Pine Nuts – The Alliance Ticket
February 7, 2024 | McAvoy Lane
What Would Mark Twain Say?
How nice might it be, were we able to earn voting power. Yes, one vote for everybody, two votes for high school grads, three votes for college grads. The Constitution says nothing against it. As it is, I drive a good friend to the polls and we split the ticket, he being a graduate of Harvard Law School. Under an Earned Voting Law, I would be inspired to go back to college and graduate to pull even with my pal and avoid getting clobbered at the voting booth.
Also, a third-party “Alliance Ticket” might be helpful. This party would be dedicated to getting things done through cooperation and compromise sans animosity or acrimony.
So what might Mark Twain have to say?
“I don’t vote for politicians, it only encourages them. Well look at it, look how difficult it is today to find a politician with morals and ethics high enough, that he will stay bought.”
Okay, so let us safeguard our enfranchisement. How ‘bout a simple competency test on governance to weed out those who don’t know the Constitution from the Lord’s Prayer. What keeps our republic afloat is good citizenship. We all need a moral compass to help us reject exclusionary and violent ideologies. Do I hear a second? Yes, Mr. Twain…
“In political independence I have found a spiritual comfort and a peace of mind quite above price.”
Agreed, a third-party Alliance Ticket will serve to inspire our body politic to become a more ethical and moral institution. We might need the help of an army of historians, educators and journalists to lift us out of our present predatory two-party malaise, for we live in a house divided, and we know what Abe Lincoln had to say about that…
Our mutual friend Mr. Twain has some words of caution that might be helpful in the organizing of an Alliance Ticket…
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Also, there is this Twain caveat, “To create man was a quaint and original idea; but to add the sheep was tautology.”
So whom might we dragoon to head-up this Alliance Ticket? I would do it myself, but I have this carbuncle that is just killing me. No, we shall leave the filling of these wide-open seats to you, the gentle reader. Meanwhile, let us accept our present system as an obligation to do what is just, and kind.
Finally, as is our custom, we shall leave the last word to Mark Twain…
“No country can be well governed unless its citizens keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more. This atrocious doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort, and doubtless it was borrowed, or stolen, from the monarchial system.”